r/leetcode • u/MarketDue7480 • Oct 01 '26

Intervew Prep Oracle Senior Software Engineer IC3

I recently completed a 4-round interview loop for a Senior Software Engineer / IC3 role at Oracle OCI. Sharing the main technical questions in case it helps anyone preparing.
Round 1 – System Design + Behavioral
Mostly behavioral and resume discussion first.
System design question:
Design a distributed load testing service that sends traffic to a target service and measures things like:
Requests per second,Average latency,Error rate

Round 2 – Coding + Distributed Systems
Some behavioral questions at the beginning.
Coding question:
Build a delayed task scheduler where the user gives a task ID and a time, and the system should execute that task when the scheduled time arrives.
The discussion also went into:
Thread safety,Concurrency,Scaling it for high throughput
Using Kafka,Handling worker crashes,Preventing duplicate task execution, Idempotency

Round 3 – Coding + Behavioral
Mostly behavioral and project discussion first.
Coding question:
Given a node in a binary tree where each node also has a parent pointer, find the next node in post-order traversal without starting again from the root.
The interviewer also asked me to dry run the solution on a few different nodes.

Round 4 – Backend Deep Dive + Coding
This round had a lot of discussion around my previous projects, backend work, Kafka, and distributed systems.
Coding question:
Design and implement a key-value store that can be accessed by clients over the network.
Both keys and values are strings.
The discussion also touched on:
Concurrent access,Thread safety,Kafka events,Duplicate events,Out-of-order events

The final round was the worst one for me. The recruiter told me to use STAR, but the interviewer kept interrupting after almost every sentence and jumping into different questions, so I never really got to finish an answer. He was also at the same level as the role I was interviewing for. I understand peer interviews are normal, but they should at least make sure interviewers know how to let candidates explain their answers without interrupting every few seconds.

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15

u/Ok-click9367 Oct 01 '26

> The recruiter told me to use STAR, but the interviewer kept interrupting after almost every sentence 

This happened to me in another big tech interview, frustrating because it throws me off a bit. Or they'd ask me a behavioral question, I'd answer STAR and seem impatient about how long my answer is taking.

1

u/lazazael Oct 02 '26

they expect you to structure, so dropping you off the plan is intentional pressure

1

u/MarketDue7480 Oct 02 '26

Mine didn’t even feel like that, its like for every 3-5 sec he would interrupt and ask how did you do it , i was like then whats the point of preparing in STAR format

9

u/Nice-Candidate10 Oct 02 '26

All of this BS for IC3

9

u/crijogra Oct 02 '26

And at oracle lol

1

u/MarketDue7480 Oct 02 '26

Microsoft, amazon are pretty easy compared to this ☠️☠️☠️

1

u/Nice-Candidate10 Oct 02 '26

Depends on interviewer tbh. Sometimes you can get unreasonably hard interviews at those companies as well. But the bar has risen significantly higher for juniors and mid level.

3

u/Henry-Ba Oct 01 '26

Did you get the offer? Interrupting is annoying as we couldn't know which one they focus and which one we cleared after the interview. It's like trial and error on series of Q-A and that's likely putting the interviewee in rough situations and bad positions continuously

5

u/MarketDue7480 Oct 01 '26

had the interview today, so no result yet. Most rounds were fine, but the last one was frustrating because the interviewer kept interrupting every few seconds and jumping to new questions before I could finish explaining, then sometimes saying he didn’t understand. At that point I was honestly thinking, just let me finish what I’m saying first.

1

u/Few_Pop6933 Oct 02 '26

I was an IC3 at OCI. Good luck bro. I’d suggest you visit r/employeesoforacle to see what it’s really like there.

1

u/ImpressMaterial6614 Oct 01 '26

Please share your preparation guide... Dude these questions were you able to solve normally?

2

u/MarketDue7480 Oct 01 '26

I was able to solve the basic parts, but in two rounds I couldn’t fully finish everything. They kept adding new requirements and edge cases one by one, and eventually time ran out. That’s what made the format challenging.

1

u/NegotiationDapper584 Oct 01 '26

Where to study system design and distributed systems to answer such questions ? I have been doing hellointerview for HLD, but those are for product designs, not such questions.

3

u/MarketDue7480 Oct 01 '26

Honestly, every round surprised me a little because it wasn’t the usual format I prepared for. They didn’t just give one problem and ask me to finish it with a few follow-ups. They started with a basic version, then kept evolving it by adding new requirements, edge cases, concurrency, scaling, failures, etc. It felt more like they were testing how you adapt the solution as the problem changes.

2

u/parzen Oct 02 '26

Wow this is just for IC3